Web comic art experiments, Phase 1

click to see at full-size, and read

For a while now I've been saying that I'd like to get into graphic novels ... and for just as long I've had ideas about how it would be done and what it would look like. At last I've had the chance to put some things together, and here ... for your entertainment and amusement, is the first experiment!

Obviously it all stared life as individual renders which were done in DAZ and then assembled in Serif. Nothing magical about this...

What a cool way of telling a story. It's literally made for me ... and what got me quite excited a while ago was the news that the Apple iPad is perfectly designed for displaying graphic novel pages, at about 10" high and about 6" wide. I need to thrash out the details, but -- this ain't hard, and it's very exciting.

Jade, 18 July

Fantasy art ... working with monochrome

Just some experiments today ... but darn, they're beautiful! I've wanted to try working with monochrome for some time, and the opportunity presented itself literally because I was stumped for something else to do in 20 minutes flat, which is all the time I had! I've always been fascinated by those cinematic special effects where the hero is having a melt-down, and either the hero or the rest of the world drops out into monochrome. There's a strange surreal feeling about it.

Also, monochrome has a charm all its own. The way Mel Brooks used it in Young Frankenstein was terrific -- all humor aside. The movie is so funny, you're laughing so hard, you have to see it two or three times before you notice how the black-and-white format was used to get effects.

Anyway ... here's the vampire Amadeus in a couple of locations. In the top ones, the character is in color the set is monochrome. That was easy. You just render the background separately and change it to grayscale in Irfanview, or whatever you use to do these things at the speed of light. Then ship it back into DAZ Studio 3 as the backdrop. Um ... duh.

The second pair of shots, though --!

Those are not photographic effects. This was done 100% in 3D. I could have Amadeus walk around in that set, and the set would be in color, and he would be in monochrome. What the heck did I do?!

Well, actually it was easy. I took the the garden-variety-rez Michael 4 skin map, opened the files one by one in Irfanview, changed them to grayscale and saved them back in a separate folder. Then I applied them to the Michael 4 model instead of the color ones. It, uh, worked. He's absolutely monochrome in a color world.

Then I added a few GIMP brush effects just for fun. The whole thing was just an experiment -- I wanted to know if it would work, and if it did, what it would look like. Actually, it looks great ... but I do prefer the color character and the monochrome background. Nice to know how to do it the other way around, though -- in case it was ever a necessity for some artistic reason!

Jade, 16 July

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

Glamour meets fantasy ... not bad!

Remember I said I'd recently got some new toys from DAZ and Renderosity? You're looking at a heap of them in these shots!

New skin map for Michael 4 -- and it's a heck of a nice one. This is the Victor skin map, from Renderosity. It was on sale, and I couldn't help myself.

The mushrooms are the Mykos set by Poisen -- lovely detailing. (Renderosity)

The ground is The Path, by Nike -- great prop. (Renderosity)

The ruins in the background are Stone Arches for Stone Road, from DAZ. Michael 4 is wearing the Real Jeans (also from Renderosity) and the Noemi hair, which was on sale at DAZ. Further in the background are some Deluze Trees and PNature shrubs, from Renderosity. And the sky is one of my Vue skyscapes.

This set of renders is along the lines of "male glamor photography" ... a male model shoot. The jeans -- they're charcoal, or gray, or washed out black rather than the blue you're used to seeing. Ready for this? I just applied the bump map as the diffuse map! Looks like a whole new garment! Is that sneaky --?

Also, I managed to get the Fantasy Book from DAZ, which is an articulable model (say that three times fast after you've had two chardonnays too many) and the Commander starship interior set ... and obviously you don't see them here! Both are lovely, though the book is very, very hard to install, even though it comes from DAZ. It's almost like the file structure they used when the model was made is now obsolete. Just doesn't work. I did manage to get it to install, but some of the textures don't apply properly. I'm working on it...

Jade, 13 July

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!

3D science fiction ... right here on the desktop

I'm in the business of being gobsmacked lately ... the three models are just amazing ... and the fact is, the computer will handle them now, after the upgrades in March. If I'd tried handling this lot back in February -- forget it. No way could the machine have even loaded them up. Now ... here's 3D science fiction that's getting close to on a par with the state of the art ten or so years ago.

These images here have no post work done on them ... none at all. This is just the models as they load up, with lights set by me. Michael 4 has been added in -- he's wearing the flightsuit from the M4 Air Crew set. The Vanguard spacecraft is sitting in the Starcarrier hangar. Michael 4 is in the cockpit, in the ship, in the hangar.

From here on, you can go on adding lights and textures and figures to the limit of your machine's capacity. You can "dirty things down," you can pull focus with the cameras, make things look beat up ...

Woof. My hat is off to the designer who made most of what you see here. See this other post for the review of the hangar set, with links; and see this post for the renders of the hangar itself, which were done the day before.

Marvellous! I enjoy this stuff better than playing games. Five stars out of five for these models ... highly recommended!

Jade, 12 July

***Posted by MK: my connection is intermittent, too slow for this. Seriously, guys, I've got dialup speeds. How are you expected to do anything these days, at 1990 dialup speeds?!!!